Riding the enterprise horse

Adding a new Tab to the Manage Assets interface

Assets : This is the tab where the Correspondence Management assets are listed, can be searched for (based on basic/advanced search criteria), or acted upon using the various actions available in the toolbar.

Editors : This is the tab where the editor for an asset is presented (opens up), when opened for Edit or View or Copy or other such actions using the asset toolbar.

Admin : This tab is meant for users with administrator-like roles, wherein they can author the administrative assets, i.e. Data Dictionaries and Categories. The tab also allows users to export all assets in the system as an archive (ZIP), that can then be imported onto another system; thus allowing asset transport across systems.

While the above is available out-of-the-box, one can easily extend/customize the Manage Assets interface to introduce a new tab (alongside the above three tabs) that may be required to display a custom user interface (what’s displayed within the tab would be customer specific, based on the exact use case). We will see how…

Once you have your development environment setup in your FlashBuilder, you will see a project ManageAssets in it. As the name suggests, this is the main flex project for the Manage Assets UI, and hence any client (flex) side customization to this user interface, would involve working with this project.

To start with, locate the file AMApplicationSkin.mxml. You will find it under src\com\adobe\solutions\cmg\manage\skins\AMApplicationSkin.mxml. This is the Skin file for the Manage Assets interface, where you will find the declaration for the above three tabs, as shown below:

We will add our new tab (named “My New Tab“) before the Assets tab by adding an additional Spark NavigatorContent (s:NavigatorContent) as shown below:

Note that for now we have specified the label for the tab (… label=”My New Tab” …) within the skin itself, for simplicity. This should ideally be externalized to the resource bundle, just as the other tabs’ labels are.

That’s it! Once done with the above change in the skin, re-build and deploy the solution, after which, when you open the Manage Assets UI (@ http://server:port/cm/manageassets.html), you will see this:

(our new tab indicated in RED)

Of course, our new tab does not have anything to show inside it and appears as an empty canvas at this time, because we haven’t added any view within it yet. However, that should be easy, as you now need to add standard Flex components within our additional NavigatorContent, depending upon what view you wish to show up within this tab. Additional code may be needed to implement the overall business use case, the extent of which would depend upon the complexity of the same.